Thomas Merton met the fourteenth Dalai Lama three times at Dharamsala in early November 1968. The meetings were two to three hours each. The friendship lasted about a week. Merton's notes from the trip, published after his death as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, are the record we have of what was said.
Merton was a Trappist of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, based at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, about an hour south of Louisville. He had been inside the Gethsemani enclosure for twenty-seven years, most of his adult life. The Asian trip was his first sustained time outside it, made with his abbot's permission to attend a monastic conference in Bangkok and to meet Buddhist teachers in person.
In his journal entry after the first meeting Merton wrote that the discussion had been warm and cordial, and that by the end he felt the two of them had become good friends and were somehow quite close to one another. He did not waste superlatives. The conversations covered the structure of monastic life, the place of philosophy in Tibetan training, how to begin contemplative practice in the West, and the difficulty, which both men noticed, of finding Western Buddhist teachers who had done the underlying work.
Merton died on 10 December 1968 in Bangkok. He was accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan in his room after giving the talk he had crossed the world to deliver. He was fifty-three.
The Dalai Lama came to Gethsemani himself in later years, most fully for the Gethsemani Encounter in July 1996, a Buddhist-Christian monastic dialogue organised by Monastic Interreligious Dialogue at Merton's home abbey. On one of those visits he laid a white khata scarf on Merton's grave. That is the gesture he mentioned from the Yum Center stage in 2013 as the reason he was glad to be back in Louisville.